HUMAN ORIGINS

• From the beginning of the colonial era a notion widely shared was that, before the advent of the white men, South Africa was mostly uninhabited. The only Africans the whites encountered when they settled at the Cape were scattered groups of hunter-gatherers, whom the settlers called Bushmen and the Hottentots. Both these groups were said to consist of multiple tribes, each with its own particular language and culture. Then, in mid 17th century, "more civilised" Bantu tribes arrived.

• The new anticolonial orthodoxy claimed that the whole notion of a tribe with a specific culture and language had been created by colonial antropologists and did not truly exists. Obviously also this position is exagerated but in the opposite side.

• Studying African history we must start much further back than historians have been wont to do. South Africa has, at every stage, been at the forefront of the development of life on earth.

• 6 to 8 million years ago the earliest hominids branched off from  a broader family of primates which also included African forest apes, gorillas and chimpanzees. The hominids differed from the apes because they developed the ability to walk upright. This capability changed their whole way of life and may have later resulted in the invention of tools and language.

• The first skull of such  a hominid , called Australopithecus africanus, was  discovered in 1924 near Taung in South Africa by Raymond Dart . Maybe it was the "missing link"  between apes and humans. More recent  evidence has shown the existence of different kinds of hominids as Australopithecus africanus  (Lucy), Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens.

•  Our real ancestor, Homo sapiens sapiens, emerged about 300 000 years ago. About 100 000 years ago Homo sapiens sapiens moved up through Africa and crossed the Red Sea into the Levant, where he stayed for some 40 000 years. Finally, about 60 000 years ago, he moved on into Europe and 20 000 years later spread all over Europe and into Asia so that 300 000 years ago he replaced all other hominid species. The saga of these successive great migrations lies at the root of all human history. It is tempting to believe that the myth of Moses leading his people out of Africa, through the desert and the Red Sea, is a distant human memory of that great saga.